Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health

That is the real problem. I've been working from home for most of my career, but I also have friends (some i made while working, some from other common interests) and we meet at least every weekend.

Covid was an exception because it made "work from home" literal, as the isolation was the point.

Of course even in normal times, coworking spaces cost money and have to be available, so you might now have a situation where workers now have to pay extra to not be isolated. And not everyone can do or wants to do that.

Sure, it's very easy to just "not feel like it" and stay home alone for a week at a time. But I've found that this is usually a reaction to being forced into some situation I don't particularly enjoy, like being compressed like a sardine twice a day on my way to a noisy office where I can't get anything done.

Working from home has actually made me much more social. I'm not drained and annoyed with people at the end of the workday, so I have energy to attend social activities. And, paradoxically, I'm even somewhat closer to people at work: now that I don't have to hear them all day long, I'm much more open to actually interacting with them when I do see them.

And the scientists don’t seem to be aware of this, because later on in the conclusion they talk about what other governments can learn from this, policy-wise.

The severe flaw in this logic, unless with other governments they mean state-wise within the US, is that it only looks at US Americans, who have a very own subset of unique variables you hardly see in other parts of the world and populations that do influence the outcome.

America is a pill-popping nation.

https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/americans-will-spend...

And the health education of the average American is rather poor, with over 60% of U.S. adults demonstrating inadequate health literacy in this study from 2025.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133552...

What surprises me here is the shortsighted conclusion.

How can you conclude this:

"Although a large body of research finds that workers want to work remotely, our findings suggest that workers may not realise the costs of remote work for their well-being, which may take time to accumulate. Understanding remote work’s impact on mental health is important for workers deciding where to work and for firms and governments setting remote-work policies."

Rather than, obviously, we have to deal with a highly health-uneducated overall population in the US, that is overall less resilient to mental distress, tends to look for quick fixes (pill popping) rather than eliminating the factors causing the need to take pills in the first place, and that is largely unable to develop strategies on their own to deal with temporarily forced isolation and has severe problems adapting to rapidly changing external factors and the mental load they put on the individual.

How can we teach the average American to be more resilient, have better health education so they can make better decisions and get them off so many pills?

I know. This study examined how remote work affects isolation and mental distress.

And therefore not the root cause of the underlying systemic problems.

But it is annoying to see smart people who should know and see the root of the problems, rather looking for grant money than for solutions.